Beware the Powerhouse Museum membership system
If you have a Powerhouse Museum membership pay very careful attention when you renew.
My membership was set to expire on 31 May 2014. Wanting to make sure I didn’t have a gap in membership, I went and renewed the membership in April. I opted for another three-year membership.
A few weeks later a letter arrived accompanied by a new membership card. The membership was only for one-year. I phoned up the Museum and explained I had renewed for three years and had received only one year. They would fix it.
A couple of weeks pass and, yesterday, I receive a second letter and card. This one is a three year membership but it is set to expire on 30 April 2017, instead of 31 May when my current membership expires – so somewhere I had lost a month from my original membership.
On the phone again. The people I spoke to were lovely, but explained that the system works that way. The membership runs from the month of the date you renew in, not from the end of your membership. If I had renewed in March I would have lost two months and so on. Now that’s not just wrong, it’s illegal. I was not a new subscriber, I was renewing my membership and in anyone’s terms that means that the renewal has to run from the date of the old one expiring. Anything else is a rip-off.
As I noticed, and phoned up, the Powerhouse is adjusting the renewal date and issuing yet another card. But ‘the system’ is not apparently something they can just change, what I experienced is built-in to the way the membership system works. So if you are renewing your membership, pay very careful attention to what you get.